More visits likely from storms like Sandy, Irene and Lee

Tropical cyclones like Sandy more likely to pound Northeast

By Brian Nearing

Published 8:47 pm, Thursday, May 15, 2014

Albany

New Yorkers and others in the Northeast can expect a future of more intense rains from so-called tropical cyclone storms, like Sandy, Irene and Lee, that battered the state in recent years, a national climate science expert told a conference Thursday at the University at Albany.

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Kunkle also was part of the National Climate Assessment issued last week, which found the Northeast is projected to have a greater increase in extreme storms during this century than any other part of the country. As part of recently published research, which included 18,000 storms from 1908 to 2009, Kunkle found that tropical cyclones — ocean-based storms that spin ashore and bring intense winds and rains — have been on the upswing since the 1990s in the Northeast, and that storms are bringing increasing deluges, a trend that is expected to continue.

Preliminary research indicates this is because a warmer atmosphere driven by global warming is able to hold more moisture for the storms to carry and dump inland as rain, he said. "Most of the additional rain is coming in August, September and October, which accounts for much of the upward trend," he said.

Such tropical storms derive energy from evaporation of water from the ocean surface, which ultimately recondenses into clouds and rain when moist air rises and cools.

Ray O'Keefe, head of the Albany office of the National Weather Service, also attended. "Our mission is forecasting that is protective of life and property, and all of that begins with good science," he said. "We need to know how to change forecasting techniques that might need to evolve."

Climate change is making uncommon weather more common, said Art DeGaetano, director of the NOAA Northeast Regional Climate Center. A 100-year storm — meaning a storm that had a 1 percent probability of happening in any given year, represented about 3.7 inches of rain, according to measurements from 1950 to 1979.

But between 1980 to 2009, those odds of increased rain in a storm went up. Now such storms have a 1 percent chance of happening every 66 years, meaning the odds of storms happening are a third more likely.

An international scientific consensus has found climate change is being driven by increasing atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels. Currently, about 9 billion tons a year of CO2 are being emitted globally into the atmosphere — the equivalent weight of 4.5 billion pickup trucks being launched into the atmosphere, said Aiguio Dai, an associate professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at UAlbany.